In these challenging times, it is sometimes helpful to think about how today’s innovations--and today’s struggles—will change the world we live in. Recently, a friend—himself an international leader in open and online education—challenged me to think about how all the innovations in technology and the struggle for institutions and individuals to keep pace with the accelerating pace change will impact our colleges and universities in the years ahead. “What,” he asked, “will public universities look like in 2030?”
It is near impossible to paint a detailed picture of the future. However, his question got me thinking about current innovations that might have an ongoing impact on our institutions and on how we think about higher and continuing education as both individual and institutional actions. Here are some thoughts about specific innovations that might help shape the higher education environment that my grandsons may experience. I am sure there are many more potential change agents out there, but I hope these will help start a discussion.
The K-14 Movement In 2020, a few states—led by New York—made the first two years of college tuition-free in public colleges and universities for resident high school graduates. By 2030, we can expect that this K-14 movement will become a standard feature of public higher education—that most young people will be expected to complete the first two years of college, just as their parents were expected to complete high school. This could greatly increase enrollment demand in general education courses and could also increase the demand for associate degrees in many disciplines. A universal K-14 environment—which would include both general education and some professional studies at the associate level—would also change how colleges think about the role of general education and its relationship to both the high school curriculum and the upper division professional studies.
Micro-Credentials In Thank You for Being Late, Tom Friedman wrote that, while a baccalaureate degree used to prepare one for a career, today it just prepares students for their first job. This is because of the continuing acceleration of both technological and social change—what Christopher Beha, editor of Harper’s magazine, called “the Age of Acceleration.” One way that colleges and universities can respond is to create an ongoing relationship with graduates and employers, offering continuing education in the form of micro-credentials that allow new professionals to stay in touch with changes in their fields. The demand for micro-credentials will vary, depending on the professional discipline, involved. In some cases, they may begin after the associate degree—the end of the K-14 phase of education. In other cases, they may allow an institution to continue the education of alums who enter a profession after their baccalaureate degree or even after a graduate degree. Ideally, credits earned in a micro-credential could be applied to the next highest degree, giving new meaning to the ideal of “lifelong learning.”
Collaboration We have begun to see institutions collaborating to deliver graduate degrees and specialized courses so that all their students have access to the best possible education, regardless of their geographic location. One example is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA), which allows state universities in the U.S. to ensure that their students have access to the best possible academic resources in specialized undergraduate and graduate degrees, and CourseShare, through which institutions in the Big-Ten Academic Alliance can share access to specialized language and area studies courses housed at other campuses. This idea should continue to expand to include new professional areas and also to include international collaborations.
These elements have existed in higher education for many years. Over the past decade, on-line technology has greatly increased the use of these nontraditional approaches. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and other events have accelerated the acceptance of online and remote teaching within the mainstream.
The questions for us in 2020, as we look ahead to 2030, are simple (more simple than the answers, I suspect): (1) what elements of today’s state-of-the art technology and pedagogical innovations will have lasting effect and should, as a result, be moved more quickly into the mainstream? And (2) how should the continuing and eLearning functions, which have thrived on the fringes of some institution for more than a decade now, be mainstreamed so that faculty and the institution, generally, can use them to respond to the changing needs for higher education?
I hope this encourage discussion of topics that should be addressed to help our institutions and governing bodies better prepare for 2030.
THOUGHTS??
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